At Least a Partial Understanding of Vaccine Hesitancy

 

While I really do believe that a lot of Trumpster opinion leaders are working to spread the pandemic for political gain, what about their followers?  What makes so many people react so strongly to masks or vaccines and be indifferent to the prospects of a deadly virus?

I can see several psychological phenomena at work here.

One is simply the well-known phenomenon that people respond more strongly to swiftness and certainty of consequences than to severity.  The consequences to any individual of catching COVID can be severe, although not necessarily.  The consequences to the community of large numbers of people with COVID can also be serious.  (See, for instance water shortages in Orlando due to liquid oxygen being diverted from water processing to treating patients).  But the consequences of a shutdown or wearing a mask or even taking a vaccine are more immediate.*  Furthermore, healthcare privacy laws** are contributing by forbidding the news from broadcasting COVID wards without the consent of patients, so the realities of the disease are not fully sinking in.

Another is the highly technical, specialized nature of the information people are being asked to process.  In the end it is not facts or evidence or proof that convinces.  Only intuition is really convincing.  I learned this first hand in the most non-ideological way possible—by taking classes in calculus.  (I would not go so far as to say I actually studied it, let alone learned it).  Differentiation was easy.  I had no trouble at all understanding how to calculate the tangent of a curve.  And it made perfect intuitive sense that doing the same process backward yielded the curve.  But I was completely uncomprehending of why doing the process backward for the curve yielded the space under the curve.  No number of complex mathematical proofs made any difference.  Sure, they might convince me at the most rarified intellectual level , but my gut remained unconvinced – not disbelieving, you understand, just baffled.  It finally fell into place when my father explained that what calculus concerned, not the space under the curve, but how the space increases as you move along the curve, and my younger brother said, "But of course the higher the curve the faster it adds to the space underneath it."  Maybe if the class had begun with that understanding, I would actually have learned it.

But no matter how much calculus baffled me, I never took to the next step, to go from "I don’t understand this" to "This is false."  Some people do take that next step, and assume that if they don't understand it, it must be false.  And if so many people are working so hard to convince us of something false, they must be doing it for a sinister motive.  To take a fairly mild and understandable example, as a lawyer I regularly deal with people trying to navigate the legal system who do not understanding how it works.  Running into rules they do not know and suddenly finding that they are breaking them without intending to, people operating on their own become suspicious and frustrated and convinced the system is rigged against them.  

 There are other, more dangerous examples as well.  A lot of people, confronted with incomprehensible talk about microbiology, take it as a sinister plot by microbiologists to steal our liberty.  Or people confronted with incomprehensible computer data tallying election totals start looking for sinister patterns in it to prove the election was stolen.  And this tendency is not limited to the ignorant.  Andrew Schlafly is a highly educated man with a law degree from Harvard who served on the law review and a background in microelectronic engineering.  Yet when confronted with the theory of relativity or complex numbers and unable to understand them, he automatically concludes that they must be false.  And if scientists and mathematicians are promulgating false doctrines they must be doing it for some sinister purpose, which Schlafly assumes to be to undermine traditional religion and morality.

I did my own research

Other people decide not to jump to immediate conclusions but to "do their own research."  So why does this keep leading to disaster?  People researching a field they have no systematic understanding of are almost immediately bombarded with huge amounts of data they lack the understanding to process. When people are bombarded with huge amounts of data they can’t process, they tend to become suspicious and distrustful. There are plenty of mundane examples.  Deaf people see people talking and wonder if the people are talking about them, or see people laughing and wonder if they are being laughed at.  People with normal hearing who hear people talking in an unfamiliar language react, let alone laughing, react in much the same way. 

Furthermore, people are not comfortable with vast quantities of meaningless data.  We long for a pattern.  People are, in fact, often quite good at recognizing patterns in seemingly disparate information.   But we also tend to impose patterns where none actually exist.  A lot of that is harmless, as when we look at clouds to see what they look like.  We all know clouds are not really whatever shape we see, that they are really just meaningless water vapor, and that the form exists solely in our imagination.  The danger is when we don’t realize that.  The danger is especially when we start sorting through huge mounds of data the we don’t really understand, with a pre-determined hypothesis.  Invariably we will see little bits here and there that support that hypothesis.  Stitch those together – while ignoring the vast mounds of data that do not support the hypothesis – and pretty soon we can find whatever we are looking for.  And there is a word for this.  It is called paranoia.  And it is an occupational hazard of looking for patterns in disparate data.  

And, needless to say, the same rule applies to people looking through incomprehensible computer data for "proof" that the 2020 election was stolen.  Or that 9-11 was an inside job.  Or any other preconception one may be looking to confirm.  

My favorite example of the phenomenon is this link here, taken from the days when the most popular conspiracy theories were about 9-11.  It starts with the hypothesis that the Irish were behind 9-11, looks through the vast mounds of data, and quickly finds all manner of disparate accounts involving the Irish that can be stitched together into something sinister.  Why the Irish?  No reason except, perhaps, that the idea will universally be recognized as absurd.  One could almost make it a game -- start looking through random, disparate data and use it to stitch together any random conspiracy theory you can come up with. But on second thought, don't.  It is far to easy to start believing that it is real.  This appears to be what happened to the maker of the ultimate 9-11 conspiracy movie, Loose Change.

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*And yes, I am no exception here.  
**Real healthcare privacy laws, not the ones anti-vaxers make up.